🗣 WRITERS AREN'T SHUTTING DOWN HOLLYWOOD THE NETWORKS ARE
a collection of motivational insights regarding content creation and creative hobbies
and of course the classic
“My creative writing professor told me to stop writing about love. I asked him why and he said “because you have turned it over and over in your hands, felt every angle, every fault, every inch, every bruise. You have ruined it for yourself.”I spent the next 3 weeks writing about science and space. Stars exploding. Getting sucked into a black hole. How much I wished I could sleep inside of that nothingness without being annihilated. What an exploding star would taste like. If it would make our stomachs glow like fireflies, or tingle and shake like pop rocks under our tongue. My creative writing professor told me that those poems weren’t what he was looking for. He tells me to stop writing about outer space. Stop writing about science. Again, I ask him why. Again , he says “You have ruined it for yourself.” I spend the next three weeks writing about my mother, how we are told we can’t make homes inside of other human beings, but the foreclosure sign on my mother’s empty womb tells me that women who give birth know a different, more painful truth. My creative writing professor tells me I am both talented and hopeless, that everything I write is both visceral and empty, a walking circus with no animals inside but a beautiful trapeze artist with a broken hip selling popcorn in the entrance-way. He tells me to stop writing about my mother. I don’t ask why. I pick up my books and my notepad and I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star, like the taste of the last person I ever loved, like my mother’s baby thermometer, and I do not look back. We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness and we will never stop writing about love, about black holes, about how quiet it must have been inside the chaos of my mother’s belly, inside the chaos of his arms, inside the chaos of the spaces in every poem I have ever written. None of this is ruined. Do not listen to them when they tell you that it is.”
— my creative writng professor told me to stop writing about love | Caitlyn Siehl
Every few years I randomly think of this beautiful poem that I first read on here probably a decade ago, and I have to drop everything and scour the internet looking for it. Every time I think I save it, but then can’t find where. I love it so much.
“… I leave his office with my war stories tucked under my tongue like an exploding star…We are all writing about our mothers, our lovers, the empty space that we will never be able to breathe in. We are all carrying stones in our pockets and tossing them back and forth in our hands, trying to explain the heaviness…”
Just gorgeous.
There's always been several things about the "you should write because you love it/want to/for yourself, not for popularity/readers/kudos/comments/attention/praise/whatever!" talk that bothered me. It's not solely that it creates this weird implication that people who write with the intention of sharing it, and who want to share their work and interact with readers, are somehow "doing it wrong," though that's definitely one ridiculous element of it. However, I was never able to put my finger on what, exactly, struck me as so incredibly off.
And then it came to me, out of the blue, last week, as a flash of insight, and I can't believe I never realized it before.
"Creating a story" and "writing a story" are not the same activity, and the "you should write for yourself ~uwu~!" proselytizers in no way recognize that these two things are completely different.
Look, here's how it goes. I'm lying in bed, trying and failing to fall asleep, and I'm starting to get anxious about falling asleep, and the more anxious I get, the less likely I am to actually manage to sleep, so I have to come up with a way to distract myself pronto. When this first started happening to me 30+ years ago, I was at a loss, but now it's old hat, I know exactly what to do: envision a favorite character. They might be an OC. They might be from a table top RPG or LARP I've played. They might be from a favorite book, movie, show, etc. And, once I've picked that character, I think - okay, this is who I'm in the mood to think about right now. What kind of story do I want to tell? For me, I usually want an adventure with some romance, and I usually want queer, and I usually want some smut, and, and, and. The precise details depend on my mood, and how tired I am, and how long I'm lying there, and what my hormones are doing, and how my depression is, and who knows what else. Brains are fucking weird, I'm just along for the ride (and hoping I'll eventually maybe actually fall asleep).
Sometimes, I'll fall asleep before I come up with anything I really want to explore.
Sometimes, I'll fall asleep every night for a week before I come up with anything I really want to explore.
And then, when it comes, the pieces will fall together all at once, and I'll start to craft a story.
I'll imagine how the characters meet, what the conflict is, what brings them together, what tears them apart. I'll play out entire dialogs word for word with description and all. I'll imagine them falling in love, and falling apart, and falling and falling and falling until they finally rise, triumphant.
Sometimes, I can tell the entire story in one night. Sometimes, it takes me days, or weeks. The ones I like best I revisit months and years later, whenever I remember them and go, "oh yeah, I loved that one." I'll retell them over and over again, until I could recite to you the entire course of events.
I create a story.
And that activity? Is absolutely one I do solely for myself. It's epic, and it's empowering, and it makes me happy, and it helps me sleep, and it allows me to explore my emotions and picture other worlds and to tell a tale that's exactly what I want. All the best parts, with the happy ending close at hand.
You know what doing this isn't? It's not even close to writing a story.
Let's go to the next step of this process: I've got an idea and I really love it and I decide, "I want to write this down." I have absolutely no reason to do this just for myself. The story is already created. If I didn't want to share it, I literally never have to write it down. It's already in my head. It's already mine. Writing it down is done solely to share it with others - and it's an arduous, incredibly difficult slog. The story I can tell in a night or two or ten will take days, weeks, months, years to codify into elegant words suitable for consumption that communicate the images, ideas, emotions, and story that I've already created for myself. By the time I finish a novel or long fic, I've usually told the story to myself so many times that I'm fucking sick of it. The reason I never write codas and timestamps, even when I've said I would, is that seriously by the time I write "the end" I am so fucking over this garbage that I don't want to think of it again. Because my brain has told that story, to myself, and now to everyone else, and it took so flippin' long to tell it to someone else that I want to tell a new story. Heck, usually by the time I finish a long fic, I HAVE created stories, multiple stories, for myself, because I'm bored of the one I'm writing, so instead/as well, I craft a dozen others to keep myself entertained, ones I'll never write down and never share - stories that are just for me.
I truly think the vast majority of the people who are the hugest proponents of "write for YOU!" have never tried to write something long - something that takes months and months (how long that is, word count-wise, will be different for different people, of course).
I want to, and DO, create stories for myself. All the time. Constantly. Multiple times a day.
But turning the fantasy in my head into something readable? That's work, and it's work that I never have to do if the goal is just to "tell the stories I want to tell." I do that silently 24/7.
Putting it into words? That's about sharing.
And THAT is why "write for you, don't worry about readers!" has never spoken to me. And I can't believe I've been writing for almost 30 years and only JUST figured this out.
Our son Sam has told us that the D&D art file we use for a screensaver on various devices bothers him.
Because it makes him frustrated that he can’t look at some of them longer. He wants to know what is happening in some of them.
I told him that is one of the reasons we play Dungeons & Dragons, so we can go find out together, in our collective imagination.
Not really D&D related- but I feel compelled to add to this that not only are these GORGEOUS pixel arts- they are also in fact not animated. There are no frames used. There’s no extra pieces of art. Just one layer.
These pieces are so old that they stem from a time where animating cost way too much memory and/or only 256 colors could be used at one time, so the motion is achieved by ‘color cycling’. Half the available colors would be reserved for that very color cycling. It’s mchecking bonkers, please go watch this video if you feel like learning the technical details of how these artworks were made! They were screensavers that would match the actual time of day that you were in. Somehow. Just by cycling color palettes. Wild shit.
(Especially relevant time stamps for color cycling: 5:50, 9:55, 37:26, at 49:54 he gets into the technical side of HOW this even works)
Yup.
I’ve always enjoyed how they depicted some of the landscapes at different times of the day/weather/season.
Like these two areas. Daytime and nighttime at the village by the waterfalls.
And the high mountains hidden by rain in one and visible in the other.
These are by Mark Ferrari!
You can find his gallery here, including options to view the scenes at different times of day some with sound: http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/
Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, published in Rilke and Andreas-Salomé: A Love Story in Letters
this reply in the comments tho
This did not go where I expected from the first tweet and now I am laughing so hard I am crying.
i am once again thanking the universe for former buzzfeed star and emmy- and golden globe winner quinta brunson
"i can probably get this fun new fic idea written out as a coherent oneshot in a few days, and then afterwards i can get back to writing my other project(s)" <- this is the devil speaking through you
Hey friends. Do this:
This probably took this person 3 seconds to do but it immediately told me that they liked my story enough to come back and read it again and they liked it again the second time.
Your favorite writers Do Not Know that you think about their stories after you read them. I generally assume that my stories make people happy for the few minutes they’re reading and then they never think about it again. To know that that’s not the case and that someone has returned just makes my little heart swell with joy.
I needed this today. If you’re the person who left this comment (or if you’ve ever commented on any of my writing) I love you.
Well this is the most popular post I’ve ever done by an order of magnitude…
The best part has been the people putting tags on their reblogs along the lines of “I’m totally going to do this now” and “I didn’t think authors would like something this simple but I can do this” and authors saying how much this type of comment also means to them.
The second best part was the person who went and read Worship because of this post and then commented on it.
An interesting part has been seeing what a kind of popular post does to your notifications.
I’m really glad this post took off, especially if it means a few more authors get this kind of comment.
You know, watching Goncharov entirely through the medium of tumblr posts shared by people I follow isn’t significantly different from how I experience a lot of media these days.
Goncharov, House of the Dragon, equally real to me.
“suffering feels religious if you do it right” no shut up it doesn’t. my friends laughing in the kitchen while i make dinner feels religious. the sun on my face after a long winter feels religious.
somebody in the notes posted this screenshot from the one & only, ursula k let guin. and now i'm screaming wtf
thought this image would be enjoyed here at tumblr.com
i hope that one day i will finally be ok….i’ll make a cherry pie when it is all over
today is the day
reblog the cherry pie to be ok
The cherry pie worked for me and here’s to hoping it’ll work for you too
Let the cherry pie do it’s magic